Ladybug
by EveLGW
Summary: My first attempt at a CSI-story (GSR). Consider yourself warned :-)


Title: Ladybug  
Author: Eve (little_grey_woman42@yahoo.de)  
Category: GSR, angst, sap alert (no kidding!)  
Rating: PG-13 (I think)  
Spoilers: Post Primum Non Nocere to be safe  
Feedback: Yes, please :-)  
Author's notes: My first CSI-ff. May suck big time. Again, no kidding. So - consider yourself warned and don't blame me for any side effects you may experience afterwards. :-)  
  
  
  
Ladybug  
by Eve  
  
  
He discovered it as twilight was breaking.   
  
Out of the corner of his eye he saw something twinkle, something that reflected sunlight.   
  
He turned towards it and slowly approached the item.   
  
Not wanting to get his hopes up he waited until he stood right in front of it, then bend down, got onto his knees and carefully swept the layer of dirt away that buried already half of it.   
  
Only when he saw the familiar letters on its back etched deep into the smooth silvery surface, when he traced them with a trembling finger, he let go of the breath he didn't know he had been holding.  
  
~~*~~  
  
She never wore much jewellery.   
  
Gold wasn't her style and what she wore - a ring, a pair of earrings - was mostly plain and simple.   
  
She liked it that way.   
  
When she was in a hurry, she would sometimes forget to put them on and never realise it until her shift was over and she was home again.   
  
However, she loved necklaces. Long, silvery necklaces with small pendants.   
  
She liked especially the kind you could put tiny pictures in. Liked to feel their weight around her neck.   
  
But she never opened them in order to look into the inside.  
  
Never.  
  
Until ...  
  
~~*~~  
  
They were waiting for a victim/suspect to arrive at his house in order to ask him some questions when the pendant that hang on the chain around her neck caught his attention.   
  
Deeply absorbed with her own thoughts she rather felt than saw him lean over to the passenger's site of the car where she was seated. When she felt his fingers brush her shirt as he lifted the pendant to get a better look at it, it was already to late for her to move out of his reach.  
  
It was the first time she wore that particular necklace and if she had been honest with herself she would have had to admit that it first caught her attention because it reminded her of him.   
  
Of course most of the time she wasn't and so she justified to herself the urge to buy it with the argument that the pendant was fused with the chain - a design she preferred because the clasp would stay at the back of her neck where it belonged and wouldn't slip around to the front.  
  
"A ladybug?" he asked her, shifting the small pendant in the dim light of the car.  
  
"Yeah," she answered and felt her heart rate speed up like it always did when he invaded her personal space.   
  
How 'he' could be so calm about it and why 'she' always had to react that way was something she hadn't been able to figure out yet. Being a person who liked to solve puzzles and who relied on and trusted in facts that ruled out any form of ambiguity this aggravated her to no end.   
  
Still, she didn't seem to be able to do anything about it.  
  
She had long ago accepted her attraction to her former teacher and current supervisor while knowing at the same time that he would never pursue a relationship with her that went beyond friendship. He was much too focused on his work, too much a man who valued his privacy above everything else and who liked to keep things simple and clear. Relationships, real relationships were always messy and she knew that he wasn't ready to invest into something that risky - especially when it involved emotions.   
  
But once in a while she thought that maybe, just maybe there was the potential for something more.   
  
The expression of pride on his face when she managed to find that tiny detail, that piece of evidence that brought the break-through in an especially difficult case.   
  
The way he always knew when a case got to close to her and the way he tried to remind her that she was surrounded by a world that consisted of more than just gruesome murders, that had actually hope and ... beauty in it.   
  
The look on his face when he was watching her from the other side of the room when he thought that she wouldn't notice.  
  
But she did notice and was aware of what he was doing.   
  
Very much so.   
  
All those things were part of the mystery that was Gil Grissom. A mystery she got more and more the impression she would never be able to solve completely, because he always kept her guessing.   
  
Trying to resist an insane urge to run her fingers through his hair, she averted her gaze from his bend head, counted the seconds and waited for him to scoot back over to his seat. But when, after a whole minute, he still hadn't moved away but continued to stare at the small pendant, she felt the heat rise up to her cheeks. Obviously - as always - completely oblivious to her reaction, he kept studying the small trinket, turning it around in his hand.  
  
Just when she was about to ask him what he was doing he said:  
  
"You know, the antennas of this beetle are completely wrong. The spots in its back suggest that this beetle is supposed to be a Coccinella septempunctata, but the antennas look like they belong to an Adalia bipunctata, also known as the two-spotted ladybug which makes absolutely no sense ..."   
  
"Gris," she tried to interrupt him, but as always when he was on a roll he ignored her and simply went on with his analysis of her beetle-shaped jewellery.   
  
"... And the way the legs are bend - they look like they are broken. The poor thing probably wouldn't be able to crawl a single step and ..."  
  
"Grissom!" she tried again, this time a bit louder and at the same time pulled on the chain in order to lose it from his grasp. That finally got his attention and he stopped his lecture and looked up.   
  
Their eyes locked and for a crazy moment he seemed to move even closer to her and she felt herself lean in ... when suddenly a cat slivered with a loud, screeching noise over the hood of the car only to vanished again as quickly as it had appeared.   
  
They jumped apart and she felt a sharp pain when their opposite motions caused the necklace to cut into her skin before it finally snapped from the strain.  
  
"Damn!" she exclaimed and rubbed the back of her neck with her hand.  
  
"I'm sorry, Sara. I didn't mean to ..." he started to apologise.  
  
She wasn't sure whether he meant the necklace or the near kiss just like she wasn't sure about what her own reaction was referring to.   
  
"Does it hurt?" he asked, concern apparent in his voice.   
  
He was about to reach out in order to get a closer look at the bruise she felt already forming when suddenly she moved as far away from him as the crammed space she was confined it would allow her to. After what had just occurred she couldn't stand him to be that close again so soon.  
  
Seeing and feeling her retreat, he froze midway in his motions and then quickly backed away. Confusion - and was that an expression of hurt? - crossed his features before he got them under control.  
  
"I just ..." he started again.  
  
"I'm - I'm fine, Grissom. It's nothing."  
  
Even to her own ears her words sounded strained.   
  
She cleared her throat in an attempt to make the lump that was rapidly forming there disappear. But of course it wasn't working and she silently reproached herself once again for getting so emotionally worked up over such an insignificant incident.  
  
Aware of the uneasy silence that followed her words and wanting to get over the incident as quickly as possible, she motioned towards the necklace he was still holding in his hand.   
  
"That thing wasn't very expensive anyway," she said dismissively. "I'll just buy a new one - even if it's not an scientifically exact replica of a Coccon ... Coccinello ... whatever its Latin name is supposed to be."  
  
She made an attempt to smile and expected him to agree with her and to throw that damn thing away but he just tilted his head to the side, looked at her and said:   
  
"No."  
  
"What?"  
  
"No, you don't have to buy a new one. I'm going to fix it."  
  
"Really Grissom, that's ridiculous. It's not worth it," she said and reached out to take the necklace out of his hands, but he moved it out of her reach.  
  
Again he decided to ignore her comment, held the silvery object closer to his eyes and tried to open the pendant.  
  
"Do you want to keep the pictures until the chain is repaired?"  
  
Still trying to figure out why the necklace was suddenly so important to him, she absent-mindedly shook her head.  
  
"There aren't any pictures in it."  
  
He had finally managed to pry the pendant open and saw for himself that it was indeed empty. He put it down, turned around and looked at her, a small frown forming on his forehead.  
  
"Why not?"  
  
She sighed.   
  
"See, it's really no big deal. Probably lots of people wear those pendants without any pictures in them."  
  
He wasn't buying it and she knew it.   
  
And although she wasn't able and willing to look into his face she knew that the frown had just deepened.  
  
She knew that expression, knew what it meant.  
  
She had just turned into a crime scene.  
  
She knew that whether she wanted to drop the matter or not, whether she felt like sharing or not wasn't important any longer. He wouldn't let go of it until he was able to pronounce his little puzzle to be officially solved.  
  
Because as possessive as he was about his own private life he seemed to be unable to see the boundaries that other people drew around themselves in order to protect theirs. Or perhaps he 'did' recognise them and decided that they simply weren't important to him and chose to ignore the subtle - or in her case not so subtle - "No Trespassing Beyond This Point"-signs that usually accompanied said borders.  
  
In the end it didn't matter what his reasons were - if she wanted this strange interlude to be over she had to give him an explanation.  
  
"Fine," she said in a tone that said loud and clear 'you-asked-for-it'. "It's because I wouldn't know what pictures to put into it, okay?" she explained sharply and continued to look straight out of the windshield, fighting the urge to cross her arms in front of her. "I'm not very close to my family, so I don't want to wear them all the time around my neck. I'm not married nor have any children, so again 'no' to that particular source of picture for me. And it would definitely feel strange to only put a picture of myself into the damn thing."  
  
She was painfully aware of what she omitting: the existence of people she felt close to although they weren't part of her official family.   
  
Especially one person in particular.  
  
And she so didn't want to go there right now. Too much had already happened.  
  
She decided that if he didn't drop the topic now she would just open the car door and leave.   
  
"I'm sorry," she heard him say again.  
  
She turned around and faced him and felt a wave of anger rising in her chest.   
  
"Stop apologising already. That isn't like you at all. It's done. Let's get over it, okay?"  
  
Again that hurt expression appeared before the well-worn mask slipped into its accustomed place.   
  
What was happening to them?   
  
Was everything she worked so hard on, gaining his trust, his respect, his friendship, falling apart just because of a damn necklace?  
  
It was completely ridiculous - why should she feel the need to defend herself for the fact that all the pendants she wore were empty? That she felt their weight around her neck, felt them day in day out despite or perhaps rather because of their emptiness, in fact needed it to remind herself of it?   
  
She knew that he would make more out of the pendant than there was to it.   
  
But there really wasn't more to it, or was there?   
  
More to it than fact that she didn't have any pictures to put into the empty pendants because there wasn't anybody to fill up all those empty spaces in her life? More to it than the fact that the one person she once believed had the potential to fill up those empty spaces could and would never be what she needed him to be?  
  
"Okay," he said with a finality that almost scared her.  
  
But before she could react to his words or follow her own train of thoughts, a car drove into the drive right in front of them and their victim/suspect stepped out of the vehicle and approached the door of his house.   
  
She automatically switched into CSI mode and tried to push the past few minutes out of her head, tried to concentrate on the case.  
  
Without another word they got out of the car and opened the doors to the back seats in order to gather their equipment.  
  
She took her briefcase out and wanted to shut the door on her side when she saw him hesitate.   
  
She realised that he still held the broken necklace in his hand.  
  
"You really think it's not worth trying?" he said softly with a strange look on his face while he took with professional ease one of the small paper bags out of his pocket, put the necklace into it, sealed it shut and let it disappear into the inside of his jacket.  
  
Then he got his equipment from the back seat, shut the door and walked up to the house without another look back.  
  
While one part of her brain wanted to inform him that he had forgotten to label the paper bag correctly, the other part was deeply confused and wondered whether he was actually still talking about the piece of jewellery.  
  
~~*~~  
  
For the next two weeks she tried hard to forget what had happened that evening in the car and tried to get back to normal.   
  
And of course it wasn't working.  
  
When Catherine asked her whether something had happened between her and Grissom she told her that it was nothing.   
  
When Nick and Warrick approached her with similar questions she just laughed it off and said that everything was all right.  
  
But when the shift in their relationship started to affect her work, she realised that she couldn't go on like that.  
  
Just when she was about to fill out 'that' form again, this time fully prepared to follow it through and live with the consequences, he approached her at the end of a shift in the locker room and handed her without words a small, brown paper bag.  
  
Also without words she took it from him with trembling hands, opened it and slid the silvery necklace with the newly repaired chain out.  
  
She could see that it wasn't the job of a professional, that he really fixed it on his own because she was still able to see where it had snapped.  
  
But when she handed it to him, turned around and lifted her hair so that he could put it around her neck again she knew that it wasn't important.   
  
The chain held.  
  
Once she felt the weight of the necklace settle around her neck, she frowned.   
  
Something was different.   
  
She looked down, took the silver ladybug into her hands, turned it around and opened the small box.  
  
She sensed his presence behind herself, felt how he took a step forward, closed the distance between them and put his hands on her shoulders. Felt the warmth he was emitting through her clothes. Felt his breath against her hair when he looked over her shoulder at the tiny picture inside the pendant.   
  
~~*~~  
  
He carefully lifted the silvery item from the ground and blew the remaining grains of sand from its surface.  
  
He stood up, brushed off his trousers and squinted at the small pendant, looking for the catch that would opened it.  
  
He felt for it and when he finally found it he pried it open.  
  
After he had convinced himself that everything was where it belonged, he closed the pendant again and made his way back to his car in order to get home as quickly as possible, all the while fingering that small, lumpy piece of chain where it once had snapped.  
  
Years of use may have worn out the clasp of the chain and made the necklace slip from her neck but the mended piece of chain was still holding. 


End file.
